By instanceofjamie on

Hello Drupaliers :-)

So, we've just finished the initial release of SubHub Lite - a site building and hosting platform built on Drupal 7, and I wanted to share it here to see what input you guys might have, suggestions you might make, and just to hear what the rest of the Drupal community generally thinks.

SubHub are based in Cardiff in the UK, and for the past few years have specialised in helping people to monetise their online content. Their current platform allows for paid subscriptions, paid downloads and ad-based revenue generation options. However, it's an entirely proprietary CMS.

In more recent times, we decided to use Drupal to build the next generation of our content management platform, and about a year ago, we took the decision to begin with Drupal 7, having recognised the improvements on the APIs, the addition of more up to date JQuery and UI libraries, and preferring the direction Drupal Commerce had taken, rather than dealing with everything that was available there and then for 6.

On November 1st 2010, we launched the first version of our baby, SubHub Lite. We've decided to deliberately focus on getting the content management part right before we integrate all the other features our clients know and love for making money. We have big plans, but releasing earlier will help us to get the basics right, and help us identify what we can release as contrib modules.

You can create a site at http://www.subhublite.com - I'd really welcome any feedback you might have. Features include improvements to menu editing, block creation and placement, dynamic theme and layout management, a new image/media manager, and a fair few other things I'm not remembering now. Oh, and it's free, of course.

Thanks, and looking forward to hearing what you all think :o)

-- Jamie Wiseman

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

beeradb’s picture

beeradb commented

If you override the default account handling in Drupal you should leave the validation behavior intact. I tried to sign up using plus addressing (http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-you...) and got a validation error, which violates RFC 5322. My general assumption when people don't allow me to use plus addressing to sign up for a service is that their intention is to sell my information. It may not be true in this case, but it's enough to to prevent me from signing up and giving the service a shot.

instanceofjamie’s picture

instanceofjamie commented

HI there,

Sorry you felt put off by the email validation, and thanks for looking at the signup form, at least!

The form at http://signup.subhublite.com/register (which I'm guessing is the one you mean) is not the default Drupal account handler - it doesn't create a user, it creates a website for you. A pretty nice one, at that ;-)

I've come across the notion of using plus characters in email addresses elsewhere, and I seem to recall that we stripped them out owing to the fact that, although the RFC specifies them as being valid, many mail clients and some servers just don't allow them - I guess they also violate RFC 5322. I'll see, though, whether we can change the regexp used to validate the email address.

I'm confused as to why you make the assumption that it means we'll sell your information, though - why do you think this? If it makes any difference, our privacy policy explicitly states that we won't, so I'm happy to promise it.

So yes. Sorry, again, and if you can bear with us a day or two, I'm sure we can alter the validation on the mail field.

-- J.

gamingdroid’s picture

gamingdroid commented

I like the Web 2.0 look with a big buttons and easy text size on the eyes. It's a very interresting site.

I'm curious to how your experience using Drupal 7 that is still in beta. Did that cause any problems in finding modules that would fit your need?

Looking back, would you have preffered to use Drupal 6 now that the site is released?

eigentor’s picture

eigentor commented

I gave it a quick whirl and have to say the wizards in the very first setup are almost foolproof. Very well done. At the moment there is not much functionality, but exactly this makes it easy to use.
You appear to have rewritten the Drupal UI heavily, so it took a while to get used to it for me. People that are not expecting Drupal sure won't care.

The biggest problem I found was that I find not one beautiful theme in there. All two sidebars and blocky header stuff. I can see you have to be generic in some way by having sidebars, but do they need to look like this? The subhub site itself has a very nice design as the wizards have. So you have a designer somewhere ;). Get her / him to do some nice designs, and you will raise the value of the service enormously.

In General, I found the site to be very similar to buzzr, as you drag-and-drop what you call "apps" into the sidebars, don't know what buzzr calls it.

paolo12’s picture

paolo12 commented

Look and feel of this site is very good. I like white background, big readable text, buttons, etc. It looks very professional!

Devaraj’s picture

Devaraj commented

It would be great, if you share your development experience too... what are all the drupal moduels helped you to delvelope this. etc.

Thanks
Devaraj
Group FMG

vegantriathlete’s picture

vegantriathlete
he/him/his
Primary language English
Location Lakewood, CO
commented

I believe they have moved to roll-your-own code.

http://blog.marceisaacson.com

mcfilms’s picture

mcfilms commented

I see instanceofjamie is still fairly active on Drupal.org. I also wonder if he could comment about the apparent shift from Drupal to custom code for both his main site and the deployed subhub sites. If this is true, I would be curious to learn what motivated the change. It would be fantastic if instanceofjamie could share the pros and cons of this switch in hindsight.

A list of some of the Drupal sites I have designed and/or developed can be viewed at motioncity.com

ryan.merritt’s picture

ryan.merritt commented

My interest level immediately shot up when I noticed the redirect from subhublight.com to the 'big name' that I am familiar with outside of the context of drupal!

Would definitely LOVE to hear about his migration away, while drupal is great for any size site of anon visitors, im sure they have lots of transactional things going on that are immediately relevant to my work as of late!

alexfarr’s picture

alexfarr commented

I am a Developer at SubHub and worked with instanceofjamie and rupertj on building the platform, these are my thoughts and not those of subhub, obviously..

Subhub's move away from Drupal was not about changing technology but rather changing business. Our Subhub Lite platform which later took over our existing platform was based on a freemium business model, so it was always a race to develop it and start making money from it before the funding ran out, sadly we did not manage that task. Several factors, such as the time to develop the platform while Drupal 7 was still in Alpha and Beta stages, and the failure to monetise early on all lead to us having to change our business model to survive. This meant ditching the freemium SAAS offering and going down the bespoke higher cost route, which is where we are today.

At the time of closure we were running about 1800 sites off one multisite install which lead to a unique set of problems, things like applying db updates across all sites after a platform update. We started to develop our own set of scripts and tools which wrapped the drush functionality, but even for a simple update and cache clear we were talking many hours sometimes stretching to days. In hind sight chunking these down would have allowed for better upgrade paths and easier client migration, but we all live and learn.